This specification relates distributed databases.
Massive distributed databases include tables that are partitioned across multiple storage devices, in which each partition stores a subset of rows or columns of a particular table. The tables of a distributed database can be backed up from time to time, which generally involves storing a complete copy of the contents of the database as it exists at a particular point in time.
A system can also generate incremental backups of a distributed database by storing only copies of individual portions of the database that have been added or changed since a full backup of the database.